He was the BBC’s North America editor, living in Washington DC for eight years before returning to a shockingly changed UK. He discusses social media, antisemitism, centrist dads and the sudden embrace of conspiracy theories
When Jon Sopel left London in 2014 for Washington DC, to become the BBC’s North America editor, everything seemed fairly stable. “The boring coalition with Clegg and Cameron, who didn’t seem that different as people,” he remembers. “Brexit was not even a glimmer.” Nor was the rest of the turmoil to come: Boris Johnson, the pandemic, Liz Truss, even Donald Trump in the US. When Sopel moved back in 2022, the country felt completely different – “like a nervous breakdown”, he says, and eerily unfamiliar. Trying to get his head around it all has resulted in a book, Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense.
“It was quite triggering to write,” he says with a small laugh, “just thinking how crazy it was.” Same here – I had wiped the words “tractor porn” from my mind until Sopel’s reminder in a chapter about the worst of our MPs (this is Neil Parish who was forced to resign in 2022 after being caught accessing explict material in the House of Commons).